Thursday, December 15, 2011

I was browsing at Heroku's services and I was a bit appalled but amused on how they were able to market simple sysadmin tasks into expensive products. I mean, $3/month for a simple cronjob entry? $100/month for SSL config? $3500/month for memcache? $6400/month for PostgreSQL? Whoever thought of this must be an effin' genius! Seriously. And I'm not being sarcastic.

Anyway, it inspired me to think of creative ways on how to make money. I won't execute my "plan", but it's a good mental exercise. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you my business plan:

Invest in or start web hosting, and other "cloud" platform services.

Invite external investors and pool their money to mutually invest in startup companies.

Find lots of willing geeks that want to start their own startup.

Invest in those startups, but make them use your platform services.

If the startups succeed, claim credit; use the success stories for inviting more external investors.

If the startups fail, you will still profit from your platform services. Money will simply flow from external investors into your pockets.

Repeat.

???

Profit!

LOLOLOL

(Update: To make this ethical, we need to give external investors the option to invest in the platform services. Letting the startups use the services would make the services popular, thereby attracting customers that the investors didn't invest in. Therefore, the external investors may end up profiting or at least reducing the risk of their investments. I started this post as a joke, but maybe this would work in the real world, especially if we build a community [cult? hehe] around this.)

At last, I have finally found the solution to the GCHQ Code Cracking challenge. After running an analysis on the above code, I discovered that it contains a message that is encrypted with a simple ROT13 cipher, which is:

LBH UNIR WHFG YBFG GUR TNZR.

The last step for decrypting the above code is left as an excercise to the reader.